Icon pioneered role of women in politics

Pundits are declaring 2018 the Year of the Woman, but Faith Ryan Whittlesey did that decades ago.

They are calling it the Year of the Woman in politics.

Don’t try selling that to anyone who knew Faith Ryan Whittlesey.

Clearly, the conservative firebrand and icon of Pennsylvania politics was ahead of her time. By about 45 years. More than four decades ago, she was THE woman in politics.

hittlesey died Monday at 79 after a long battle with cancer. Her career started in Haverford, with stints in Media, Harrisburg, the West Wing of the White House and even an ambassadorship to Switzerland along the way.

The women who find themselves jockeying for position on today’s ballots owe a debt of gratitude to the Delaware County native who blazed the trail for women in politics in the 1970s.

Whittlesey often traced her political activism to her stint as a substitute teacher in the Philadelphia school system. The one- time liberal Democrat became disillusioned with big government and hitched her wagon to the burgeoning conservative movement.

She ran for the state Legislature and won, representing the 166th District. Then another area leader, the late Rep. Matt Ryan, recruited her to run for Delaware County Council, where she would become the first female to serve as council chairman.

Whittlesey was never afraid to challenge political standards, or the men who in those days overwhelmingly set them.

She was part of the “New Look” Republicans who replaced the Delaware County’s long- entrenched Republican War Board.

The county’s powerful GOP bosses “never owned me,” Whittlesey proudly stated.

It would be a recurring theme.

In 1976, the self- proclaimed “ideological conservative” who was increasingly dismayed by big government found a kindred spirit. She threw her support behind a one- time governor of California, backing the challenge of Ronald Reagan to then- president Gerald Ford. “The Gipper” lost the nomination to Ford, who in turn lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Some local Republicans did not forget. Neither did Reagan.

Whittlesey lost a primary bid to be the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. She believed it was payback for supporting Reagan.

Reagan remembered. He tapped Whittlesey and Montgomery County Drew Lewis as co- chairmen of his Pennsylvania campaign. His first stop in the campaign was in Folcroft. His last before heading home to get election results was at Upper Darby High School.

When he went to Washington, he took Whittlesey along with him. She was a confidante and aide, serving as assistant to the president for public liaison. She was the highest- ranking woman in the White House from March 1983 to March 1985. Reagan twice named her ambassador to Switzerland.

But she never forgot her roots. And the people she met along the way.

“She walked in the highest of circles, but her priority was family,” said Dr. Sandra Cornelius, the former Delaware County human services director and longtime chief at Elwyn. She said it wasWhittlesey who counseled her in the sometimes torturous way of thinking about political systems and strategy.

Whittlesey battled personal setbacks, losing her husband to suicide, leaving her to raise three children as a single mother. She lost an eye to cancer in 1994 and part of a lung in 2001.

She also emerged unscathed after a congressional investigation into her management of the embassy in Switzerland and her ties to Iran- Contra figure and today newly minted National Rifle Association leader Oliver North.

In 2006, she was honored by the American Rose Society with an off- white rose bearing her name. In 2010, she was presented with the International Friend of the Rose Award for her help in establishing a relationship between gardening communities in the U. S. and People’s Republic of China.

She also served on the boards of no less than six corporations.

Rest in peace to a Delaware County political icon.

Year of the Woman? Faith Ryan Whittlesey did that decades ago.